History of graphic design

Graphics (from Greek Graphikos γραφικός) are the production of visual statements on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, pottery, computer screen, paper, stone or landscape.

It includes everything that relates to creation of signs, charts, logos, graphs, drawings, line art, symbols, geometric designs and so on.

Graphic design is the art or profession of combining text, pictures, and ideas in advertisements, publication, or website.

At its widest definition, it therefore includes the whole history of art, although painting and other aspects of the subject are more usually treated as art history.


Hundreds of graphic designs of animals by the primitive people in the Chauvet Cave, in the south of France, which were drawn more than 30,000 BC, as well as similar designs in the Lascaux cave of France that were drawn more than 14,000 BC, or the designs of the primitive hunters in the Bhimbetka rock shelters in India that were drawn more than 7,000 BC, and the Aboriginal Rock Art, in the Kakadu National Park of Australia, and many other rock or cave paintings in other parts of the world show that graphics have a very long history which is shared among humanity.

This history together with the history of writing which was emerged in 3000-4000 BC are at the foundation of the Graphic Art.
Among these books are the Gospel books of Insular art, created in the monasteries of the British Isles The graphics in these books are influenced by the Animal style of the "barbarian" peoples of Northern Europe, with much use of interlace and geometric decoration.

In Islamic countries graphic designs were used to decorate their holy book, the Qur'an.

Europe changed the Islamic symbols such as scimitars and cups into graphical representations of kings, Queens, knights and jesters.
The Byzantine empire, although marked by periodic revivals of a classical aesthetic of the art of the Roman empire and ancient Greek, was above all marked by the development of a new aesthetic which Josef Strzygowski viewed it as a product of "oriental" influences.

From ancient times graphic design has been used for decoration of pottery and ceramics Less is more.

His simple geometric compositions, together with the use of only three basic colors, blue, yellow, and red, in combination with black and white created a new venue for the graphic designers.

In 1977, the New York State Department of Commerce recruited Milton Glaser, a productive graphic designer to work on a marketing campaign for New York State.
The sign as geometric representation of reality is both a rhetorical connotation and a practical technique for many symbol designers.

Martin Krampen suggested "simplified realism;" he urged designers to "start from silhouette photographs of objects...and then by subtraction...obtain silouette pictographs."

Published in leftist magazines, his work was noticed by Otto Neurath who for his ‘Vienna method of visual statistics’ needed a designer of pictograms that could summarize a subject at a glance.
Neurath invited the young artists to come to Vienna in 1928, and work on further developing his ISOTYPE.

Arntz designed around 4000 different pictograms and abstracted illustrations for this system.

Many of his designs together with those of his protégé Gerd Arntz were the forebears of pictograms we now encounter everywhere, such as the man and woman on toilet doors.

The logos and pictograms for Olympic Games change every four years and the sponsoring city develops its own logos.

A group of Olympic identity program designers collaborated on the creation of these symbols, which were employed to designate the events and installations for both the sports program and the Cultural Olympiad.
Due to the fact that graphic design constitutes the main foundation of comics it plays a crucial role in conveying various narratives through its compositional devices, line drawings and colouring scheme.

Selecting the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Roy Lichtenstein used the splash page of a romance story lettered by Ira Schnapp in Secret Hearts, (volume 83, November 1962), and slightly reworked the art and dialogue by re-lettering Schnapp's original word balloon.

This precise composition, titled Drowning Girl (1963) is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.